People often make decisions based on inadequate or outdated information. When bad information leads to bad choices, people waste time and money, become frustrated or miss opportunities. An example occurs when a parent chooses to take his children skiing at a particular ski area, only to find out, after driving for 90 minutes, that the ski area is too crowded or the conditions are poor. If the parent had had better information, the family might have gone to a different resort or chosen a different activity.
Although the World Wide Web provides access to a vast amount of information, the information may not be up to date or may not be entirely accurate. Continuing with the skiing example, the parent may access a Web page for the ski resort to check current conditions. The condition reported via the Web page, however, may only be updated on an hourly basis and may only represent statistics at that particular point in time. Thus, the parent who accesses the Web page may only be able to get weather information that is somewhat outdated and that may only represent a snapshot in time, rather than represent how the weather is trending. In addition, the ski resort may post information that tries to accentuate the positive information (e.g., “all 8 lifts are up and running and all slopes are well-groomed”), while omitting to report some negative information (e.g., “the average lift wait time is 45 minutes”). In addition, the information accessible via the Web relates to only a fraction of real-world locations, things, and activities. For example, the parent who decides not to go skiing, but wants to go to a local festival instead, may want to find out about current conditions (e.g., crowd size or ease of parking). Although the sponsors of the festival may provide a Web page for the festival, the Web page may not have any real-time information available on the current conditions at the festival. As such, the parent may take the family to the festival only to find the experience less that satisfying since the crowds were much larger than anticipated. In general, the process of posting data to the Internet usually creates a delay between the time that information is captured and the time it is made available. As a result, the Web often is a poor source for real-time information.